Living through the Cold War brought us a constant and very close awareness of the potential for a nuclear extinction event so I don’t think it’s climate change. If anything it was scarier then because there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error in a highly complex socio-technical system.
I’m of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a concerted pushback on the part of the “straights” to reassert the primacy of their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success and conventional career paths.
In Catalunya we’ve had such a network for many years and it is specifically used for providing connectivity to rural parts of the country. It’s called Guifi.net and has over 30,000 nodes. I was surprised it wasn’t mentioned in the article actually.
Always loved "Film Noir House" where every room was wired such that it narrated whatever you were doing around the house, but in the style of a Film Noir movie... "He walked into the bedroom... switched on the light..."
Half Bakery is some awesome old-skool internet stuff. Back in the late 90s it was one of my favourite haunts. Sadly they lost all their content somehow and didn't have a full backup so, funny though it is now, there was some epic stuff on the old site that is lost forever.
The cost of flat rental has risen enormously here in the past 18 months. €800 will not get you a nice flat in the centre any more. If you're lucky, you may get something OK for about €950. Lunch menus at 10 euros are not that common anymore either. €12-14 is more usual.
That said, it's the only city in the world I want to live in. I came here for a month in 2002 and never wanted to leave.
I live and work in Poble Nou and I checked out the Superille. It was marvellous.
It is (I believe) a temporary project to explore how it all might work. In that sense, it's prototype and that's in fact really cool too. Basically they did an MVP of a Superille - low cost and very fast - in order to validate their hypotheses.
They mocked up the place to give people a feel of how living in this way could be. And they spent as little as possible - using old tyres and paint and recycled plywood to mark out spaces and make them feel "owned" by the people. Placing large lots of (quite big) trees and plants in pots on the car-free streets to see how it felt to walk down a street that was leafy and spacious and open.
The amount of extra space feels inspiring and liberating. Walking is faster if you want it to be - you can cut across streets and don't need to wait at stop signals. A lot of people riding bikes. A lot of smiles.
They definitely could have done a better job explaining it though. I have friends who support the idea but felt they could have been better informed. It felt like they didn't give enough warning.
However, what is interesting and cool is that once it was in place they did their best to engage residents in a dialogue about the proposal - they painted markings on the tarmac of the streets to lay out spaces for people to assemble and discuss. They had a soapbox platform for people to rant from, and a bunch of chairs scattered around the street for people to sit and discuss. They had walls for comments to be posted.
I certainly hope they go ahead with making it permanent and making more of them.
Cities without care are very different and much more humane places to live. Scale matters and cars warp the scale of a city in ways that are counterproductive to vibrant urban life.
I'm pretty sure we can overcome the technical issues that restrain us from our inevitable transition away from routine private car use in cities. Problems like what to do about parking are a legacy of the current broken system, not a fact of nature. The economic incentives to car ownership and the infrastructure that supports it are baked into cities right now. But this can change - but not by solving parking but by solving the underlying system and that includes pressuring the system to change through initiatives like this.
I know a little about Pier 01. It's full of Barcelona and international startups, and I believe it's part of the Barcelona Activa city project to develop entrepreneurship. There's a French accelerator called Numa opening there and a bunch of other companies. I can find you someone to talk to there if you want.
I was really pleased to see that Epson have now done this. They sell a range of printers with the ink in tanks. Instead of the homeopathic quantities of ink you get in normal disposable cartridges, you buy the new ink in bottles and refill the tanks. 40 bucks buys you a complete set of CMYK inks that print 8000 pages (or so they say).
Either way the per ml price of ink is several orders of magnitude below even refilled cartridges, and since it's legit Epson ink, (hopefully) it won't screw up the print head.
Of course, the printer purchase price reflects the actual cost of making the printer as there is no cross subsidy but I am happy to pay 250 euros for the printer, in the knowledge that I won't be paying extortionate amounts for cartridges every month or two.
I also like not throwing out the used cartridges which always seems a huge waste.
>If you want to work in an environment full of rowanmannings, that is your prerogative
I have worked in an environment with one rowanmanning in it. It was awesome.
A more open-minded, funny, smart and generous guy you couldn't hope to meet. More to the point, he was one of the best coders any of us had ever worked with.
A company full of rowanmannings would therefore be a chilled out place where we'd learn from each other while having a laugh and turning out enough quality code to crush an army of pizza-fuelled dinosaur brogrammers waving their false-victimhood like a banner.
One thing that strikes me, and which I think is important is that we focus more on the fact that we could inspire a million x $10K a year companies rather than a 100 x $1Bn dollar a year companies.
Focus on the microdevelopment aspect of this rather than the dreams of avarice and VC ROI. I don't want to replicate a "Found it and Flip it" mentality.
I'd like to see a world where people start building businesses that they could feasibly pass on to their children. Solid local businesses, (both tech and traditional) using entrepreneurial tools to find and serve a need for the community.
It keeps you honest if you always put the needs of your customers ahead of your investors - who are usually looking for an exit. Continued customer revenue demonstrates that you are continuing to deliver value over time.
This is the message we should be trying to spread in the developing world, not get rich quick. Hasn't worked out so well for us, really.
I’m of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a concerted pushback on the part of the “straights” to reassert the primacy of their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success and conventional career paths.